Now I am sure that like me regular readers will have grown a little tired reading about the activities of the previous weekend.

There are only so many weeks you can comment on the weather, lack of steam and the heat before it gets a bit boring, and if it’s boring writing about it then heaven knows what it’s doing to you lot reading it.

So this week we will cover something different. We will cover the extra curricular activities of the locals.

Locals will vouch for the fact that we have some strange people visit Orton Mere Station after we have shut, not that we don’t have strange people visit when we are open, but the two groups should not be mixed together.

For as long as I can remember the station has been the haunt of bored locals looking for a bit of recreation after dark, and by recreation I don’t mean a quick game of cards or Monopoly. I would guess over the years that it’s not only ideas that have been conceived at the station.

The rest of Peterborough have bus shelters, the Orton locals have the station benches. But at least it explains why the preservative coating on the benches wears out quite quickly.

It was once said that if the place of conception had to be put on birth certificates then the local registrars office would have a rubber stamp for Orton Mere Station.

Now I know that you’re all thinking that this has nothing to do with working on the station, well you would be wrong, actually some of the evening visitors find they have a need for a PTS, but in their case it’s the Pregnancy Testing Service.

Some of you no doubt are thinking, how can we let this happen? Well if you fancy trying to stop it then feel free to pop down on a Saturday or Sunday evening, you may even be surprised but I will put in a guess that you will also perhaps be educated.

These activities do occasionally provide entertainment and even work for the staff. Normally they don’t leave rubbish about but occasionally we will come across half empty lager cans and bits of foil paper, but surprisingly in fourteen years we have never come across the contents of the foil paper left on the platform. I have memories of poor Jason having to nip onto the track to recover a set of women clothes strewn across the track, and the puzzled look on his face when he held up a thong. For a minute I did wonder if he would ask why they had bought a sling shot with them.

Perhaps if we ever do another 1940’s weekend we could set up seating on platform 2 looking towards platform 1 and say we are recreating a revue bar or perhaps the Windmill.

Now that’s a thought, we could charge an fee, that would be I hasten to add for those on platform 2 not those on platform 1